At Oriental Institute, questioning images we make of ancient times

At Oriental Institute, questioning images we make of ancient times

March 08, 2012|Steve Johnson | Tribune reporter

(Keri Wiginton, Chicago Tribune)

A new exhibit at the Oriental Institute Museum asks visitors to think twice about the images they see of ancient worlds. A painting or a model may look authoritative, but before you accept it as truth, ask yourself what assumptions the artist or archaeologist is making to complete the image, what gaps might he or she be filling in?

And then, bigger picture, consider how much of what we think we know about earlier times might be based on images that blend the factual and the fanciful.

"Picturing the Past: Imaging and Imagining the Ancient Middle East" is up at the University of Chicago's splendid temple to Middle Eastern research and culture through Sept. 2, and it is a compact, well-edited and intellectually engaging show.

In a few small galleries inside the museum's artifact-packed Gothic home — rooms that have more than a whiff of Indiana Jones to them — the new exhibition presents paintings, drawings, photographs, models and videos that together demonstrate ways in which reality can be manipulated.

It brings to mind the campfire game of telephone, where a phrase or sentence gets distorted in the retelling until only a shadow of the original phrase remains.

"There's always been that issue, that challenge of people trying to be rigorous, and perhaps appearing to be rigorous, and inserting a lot of their own interpretations," said Jack Green, the museum's chief curator and a co-curator of "Picturing the Past." "You can see how the interpretations can be added in at every single stage, even during the digging or recording" at an archaeological site.

There can be cultural bias at work. In the show, a 1930 drawing of the walls of the Temple of Ramses III at Medinet Habu, Egypt, makes the building look a little like the model for your standard chess set rook. There is some basis for the look in period imagery, but it's probably no accident that the artist was Uvo Holscher, an architect trained in Germany and thus fully familiar with medieval European castles.

There can be simple logistics that almost demand a bit of trickery. The first photographs of King Tut's tomb, from the early 1920s, helped create a sensation that endures to this day. Looking at one of them on the museum's wall, you can feel the excitement of this ostensible moment of discovery. But you also realize that the image has been expertly lit, the footprints of photographer and crew swept away to restore the pristine appearance.

And there can be an aesthetic sense that overwhelms scientific rigor. A famous Institute bust of the pharaoh's wife Nefertiti — once used as an icon of the museum — was meticulously copied from an original that resides in Berlin, thought of as one of the most precious Egyptian art finds. But the makers of the Chicago bust set their precision aside when they decided to complete the left eye, something that the original was missing.

"It's so ironic because this was done on the basis of a huge number of measurements of the original bust, a perfect copy as well as they could make it," said Emily Teeter, the museum's special-exhibits coordinator and a curator of the show.

"And then they go ahead and finish the eye. We think this has to do with this (being), for better or worse, such an icon of female beauty and the most beautiful piece of Egyptian art, blah blah blah, and so probably presenting her half-blind would just be too spooky."

Green pointed at the statue's mangled left ear, as per the original, and added, "It's weird, isn't it, because they completed her eye, but her ear is still half mutilated. Why didn't they finish her ears?"

Such questions will be further explored by Green, Teeter and a panel of experts at a symposium inspired by the exhibition from 1 p.m.-5 p.m. Saturday at the museum (registration required by calling 773-702-9507 or emailingoi-education@uchicago.edu).

"Picturing the Past" was conceived, Teeter said, in part because the Institute's archives contain wonderful works of art, some of which haven't been displayed for decades, if at all. Others, such as paintings of "Babylon," or an artist's idea of Babylon, have been on display without really asking visitors to question the veracity of so powerful a thing as a completed painting.

Teeter and Green are not, they emphasized, condemning the idea of artistic augmentation.

"These images really bring the past to life," Green said, standing by a "restrained" drawing of a Sumerian temple that has become widely accepted as indicative of what such a temple looked like. "But we don't know how high the roofs were," he said, and the archway at the gate is "just guesswork."

Said Teeter, "We're not saying, 'Don't trust anything,' but just think about it."

And think, too, about what would be lost without such interpretations, she said: "You can admire the ability of the artists and archaeologists to be bold enough to do these. If you showed (a building) partially constructed, it's just not going to have the impact."